The Person-System Fallacy

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So picture this: Joe has been experiencing congestion, intense sinus headaches, and post-nasal drip for over a week. He thinks that he may have a sinus infection and heads to the doctor. This particular doctor is fresh out of medical school, where he recently took a class all about systemic problems with our healthcare system. Joe sits in the doctor's office and is kind of put off by the doctor's approach. After checking Joe's vitals, the doctor concludes that Joe probably does have a sinus infection. But instead of prescribing him some antibiotics, as Joe had expected, this doctor starts to lecture Joe about the problems with our medical system. He tells Joe how he could provide a prescription for an antibiotic, but he notes that Joe, who is between jobs, does not have healthcare insurance and the doctor goes on and on about how the healthcare system in our society is fully broken. Next, he goes on about Big Pharma and about how the pharmaceutical companies that make antibiotics are pretty much getting away with highway robbery and how they are in bed with people running the medical professions along with politicians at various levels. For these reasons, the doctor refuses to prescribe an antibiotic and tells Joe to rest and hydrate a lot for the next few days.

Joe is kind of surprised and disappointed at the end of the visit. And to add insult to injury, Joe, who (as noted prior) does not have health insurance, has to pay a bill of $300 for this office visit before he leaves the building.

Joe goes to his car and his mind is reeling. On one hand, as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, he agreed as to all the systemic problems with our healthcare system that the doctor pointed out. On the other hand, he essentially got no treatment whatsoever and, at an individual level, as far as he was concerned, the visit was an all-out waste of money and time. He didn't go there for a lecture regarding what is wrong with the system. He went there to get rid of his sinus infection. Joe finds himself looking up other urgent care facilities in the area.

The Problem of Conflating Systemic Problems With Individual Problems

In the preceding example, I essentially explicate an example of what I'm calling the person-system fallacy. In modern higher education, we learn about all kinds of systemic problems—problems that need to be fixed at a system level. In other words, we learn about systems that need to be changed. And, to be honest, there are probably too many such systems to name. These days, in the United States, we have system problems in such areas as:

• Public Education
• Healthcare
• Law Enforcement
• Campaign Finance
• Income Inequality

And more. Way more.

A good education these days often introduces students to these kinds of systemic issues (e.g., such as the enormous heterogeneity in health insurance across US citizens)—for good reason. There truly are a great number of systemic problems across various spheres of our society—and teaching the next generation of leaders about these problems is critical for making the world a better place moving forward.

This said, in teaching about these kinds of issues, it is important to teach people to conceptually tease apart systemic issues from issues at the individual person level. And for various reasons related to our biased social psychological thinking (see Ross & Nisbett, 1991), it is often hard for people to actually tease these kinds of issues apart.

In the hypothetical example given at the start of this piece, for example, the doctor, with an eye toward ultimately making the world a better place, ended up failing to provide Joe, as an individual person, any help with his physical condition whatsoever.

When it comes to dealing with social problems, it's important to both (a) address systemic issues in a way that leads to large-scale improvement for our shared future and (b) help individuals who need help, regardless of the systemic issues that may underlie the problems that said individuals are facing (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022). In other words, the doctor in the above example could work with government officials to work toward more equality when it comes to our healthcare system while, at the same time, offering his patients actual treatment for their physical ailments to help them as individuals. When it comes to solving social problems, we need to work to address both systemic and individual problems.

The Hypothetical Case of People Drowning in the River

Years ago, I was on a panel focusing on issues related to the person/society interface. The panel included myself, trained as a social psychologist, as well as one well-respected sociologist, among others. The sociologist on the panel gave an intriguing hypothetical example, followed by a question. The example was this:

Imagine that you are sitting at a park on a sunny day. You are having a picnic near the bank of the river, when, to your distress, you find that a person seems to be drowning right in front of your eyes. You drop your sandwich and jump into the water, ultimately saving this person's life. As you settle back to your picnic, you are shocked to see a second, completely different person, drowning and in need of help in the river. A reasonably healthy and expert swimmer, with extensive lifeguard experience, you go ahead and save this person too. By the end of the day, you have saved six people from drowning—and you never finished your sandwich.

The question asked to me by the sociologist was essentially whether I thought it was a good idea to save all these people. To be honest, it was kind of a trick question! Of course, I said "yes," with the eyes of about 50 other scholars and students looking on. The sociologist laughed and said that I was focusing on the wrong thing.

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The sociologist elaborated on the story at this point, revealing that a bridge that is upstream is broken and all the people who needed saving fell through a hole in the bridge. He essentially said, at that point, that the right answer was to fix the bridge. In other words, his point was that we need to fix systems to help people avoid having problems (no one would have drowned if the bridge were in working order from the get-go).

Immediately, I responded suggesting that the right answer was to address both, the systemic problem as well as the individual problem. Sure, fixing the bridge (or the education system or the healthcare system, etc.) is critical—particularly in the long term. But from a moral perspective, to fully ignore the individuals who are experiencing problems because of the system seems, well, just wrong. In dealing with social problems, it is often possible to address issues at the systemic and individual levels. So why not do that?

Bottom Line

Dealing with large-scale human social problems can be tricky. In our education—through books and/or simply through life—we find that all kinds of systems are broken and in need of improvement. So taking a sociological tack and educating people about these systemic problems and helping to improve them makes a ton of sense.

But in a world replete with broken large-scale systems, no doubt we are going to run into people with problems that result from these broken systems. To dismiss their problems and focus only on fixing the systems that are partly at fault seems to miss a very basic point.

In creating a more humane world for ourselves and for future generations, addressing both (a) systemic problems and (b) individual problems seems not only feasible but, I'd argue, morally obligatory.

So next time you run into someone who is having problems that seem to result from some unfair or otherwise broken social system, don't be afraid to have empathy for that person and help that person while, at the same time, in a broader sense, doing your part to help fix the many broken systems that characterize the modern world.

Refusing to see an individual's problems as separate from systemic problems that may be at the root of the individual's problems seems to reflect fallacious thinking. And I call this the person-system fallacy. Sure there are all kinds of systems in our world that lead to problems and that need fixing. But there are also all kinds of people who are suffering—partly due to the problems in these systems. To see such a suffering individual exclusively in terms of the systemic problems that partly underlie the person's suffering, thus, can be characterized as both fallacious and inhumane. It is a dehumanizing approach in some respects. In answer to my sociologist friend from that panel years ago, we need to address both kinds of problems if we really want to make this world a better place. So maybe we should.